Freedom Sunday XVIII (July 15, 2012)

Had a good time playing board games yesterday up at Bear's by the Maul.  Managed get in three rounds of gaming before my exhaustion kicked in and I had to head home and get some sleep.

First off me and a couple other folks got to play a couple of rounds of a new game called D-Day Dice.  I found it to be an interesting, but apparently rather difficult game.  We were playing without actually having the rules on hand though, so we may have been doing it all wrong.  I blame John.

The game works very like Roll Through the Ages if you are familiar with that one.  You roll a handful of custom dice and you are looking to build pools of resources by getting the die face results that give them to you.  The dice can yield Troops, Courage, Stars, Tools, or Skulls.  You have six dice to start and have to lock two down immediately after your first roll; but then you get two more rolls to try and manipulate the other four dice into the combinations you want.  The dice are red, white, and blue; two of each color.  If you get the same type of die face on each of the three colors you can get some nice bonuses out of that, or if you get a "straight" of one of each die face you can also get another reward.

You are building up these resources in order to try and accomplish a thematic World War II combat mission.  The one we tried to do was the landing on and taking of Omaha Beach.  The method for accomplishing the mission was to basically move up the beach, through various zones to the bunker, and then take out the bunker.  This is made challenging by various elements.  There are minefields and zones in the path of machine gun fire.  There are some zones that require certain Specialists (that you recruit with the Stars you roll) in order to go into and pass through them.  Also, every zone has a troop cost that you have to pay each turn you spend in that zone, and the cost rises quickly the further up the beach you get.  Making everything worse is the fact that you can only stay in a given zone three turns max, and some of them even less.

The various resources help you overcome these obstacles.  Troops gives you warm bodies to soak up the various forms of damage and attrition that come flying at you.  Tools give you a currency to buy various items that give you bonuses and reduce penalties.  Courage is spent to be able to move over zone thresholds as you go further up the beach.  As stated above Stars let you buy specialists that give you some cool abilities.  Skulls are just evil, the cancel out one other die that you have rolled; unless you can get lucky and get the one of each color trio.

It was a very quick playing game, we went through the scenario twice in a short amount of time.  The speed was helped out by the fact that John is apparently terrible at the game ;).  We died before we got past the second set of zones on the beach both times.  It feels like one of those games that will be very difficult and just require sheer perfect luck until you figure out the best combinations and strategies; and then it will be fun and challenging, but doable.  I look forward to playing some more, this time with actual rules.

This was followed up by a game of Core Worlds, a deck building game of space conquest.  The game has a really cool theme in my opinion, each of the players plays a periphery bandit/barbarian kingdom that is fighting its way towards the center of the old and waning Galactic Realm; trying to reach and take the core worlds.  Mechanically the game reminds me a lot of both Barbarossa and Eminent Domain; because of the combination of deck building and combat, but if you know about Dominion, you'll at least know the basics.  Your aim is to get the most Empire Points, you do this by adding cards to your deck, and then using the cards you draw each turn to conquer worlds and gain resources; which you then use to do the same thing on bigger and bigger scales.

The game has ten turns and each turn has five phases.  First you draw cards.  Then you build up energy.  Energy is your main resource for the game, it is how you buy cards into your deck, play cards onto the table, and activate special abilities on some cards.  Each of your planets generates a set amount listed on the card, so the more you conquer the greater your energy production.  You also have a couple of Energy Surge cards that you can spend when you have them to get some more energy.  These cards normally give you +1 but you can get +2 if anyone else at the table produces more energy than you from their planets, which is a nice little catch the leader mechanic.  You also have the ability to discard two cards to get +1 energy.  In the two games I have played we have been allowing people to do that last bit as many times at they want.  After the last game I was looking at the rules and realized you can only do it once.  Oops.  The interesting thing with energy generation is that you are doing it before you get to see what cards are available to purchase/conquer this turn.  So you have to make decisions about whether to keep more troops or to discard a couple for more buying power, stuff like that.

Next you deal out the cards that are available for this turn.  As you progress through the game you will draw from a new deck for these cards every other turn, so you are constantly introducing newer and cooler cards; which is nice.  Also cards only stay on the table for two turns max.  If they aren't taken the first turn they are out they get a +1 energy token as an incentive on the next turn, and then the turn after that they are discarded.  You draw up to a certain number of cards based on the number of players, and if necessary you keep drawing until you have both planets and non planet cards equal to the number of players.  This makes sure everyone at least has some chance of getting stuff they want.

Then you start going around the table and spending actions and energy to accomplish stuff.  You'll be conquering planets, deploying troops and starships, and drafting (buying) new cards out of the middle into your deck.  You can conquer or buy only once each time if comes around to you; but you can deploy as many units as you want each time as long as you have the resources to do so.  Conquering planets requires some combination of Fleet and Ground strength.  You basically declare you are attacking a given planet, then discard cards from your warzone (the area on the table where you have played down units) that have Fleet and Ground strength equal to or greater than the defense strengths of the planet.  Then you take it and put it on your warzone, hurrah a new planet has joined your growing empire.  After everyone has used up all their actions/energy or passed there is a quick cleanup and discard phase and then a new turn begins.

Overall I like the game.  I'm a fan of deck building and I love sci-fi and spaceships type themes.  The thing I didn't like about the two-player game was that there felt like there were a ton of cards that I was never going to see or use because of how few cards were drawn each turn; but that was fixed in the larger game.  The rising costs to buy and conquer things can be a bit unforgiving if you don't manage to keep up with the momentum; but I don't think that it is in any way impossible to catch up, just sometimes difficult.  There is definitely plenty of room in various places for analysis paralysis, and you need to go in turn order at those specific places since you are all competing for a common pool of resources.

The five player game took quite a while, but I think the time would be cut in half once everyone knew the game and knew what they were doing.  I went into the five player game with a distinct strategy, get robots and vehicles and then get the world at the end that gave bonuses for robots and vehicles.  I accomplished this, and won by one point, but I felt like I didn't do it as well as I could, and that dumb luck had its fair share of my accomplishment.  Looking forward to getting more plays in and seeing if I can get better at it.

Finally we played a four player game of Last Will.  I've reviewed that already over here, so not going into much detail on it.  I played a terrible game, making stupid choices and having a lot of incidents of "What the crap am I doing being this stupid?".  Despite my own advice against properties, I decided to give them a try, and failed horribly at using them.  I was doing things a turn or two before I should have, or picking sub-optimal choices all over the place.  In my defense I had been up for about 20-21 hours straight at that time.  But I still enjoyed the game, and tried to make clear that my anger was only at myself not at anyone else or the game.  Anders played a really good game and totally kicked my butt, and he deserved to do so.

Looking forward to next week.  I think I saw an expansion to Tanto Cuore there, and if I did then I ABSOLUTELY want to play that soon.  I <3 that game.